After years I came back to Elite because I felt, they try to repair some of the damage done with Odyssey, so I want to support that and buy the Mandalay, paint job and other things like I did in the past.
I can't use PayPal, I always used to pay with PayPal when shopping and supporting Frontier in the past. Guess, I can't pay. Oh well...
Credit Card is a no go for me.
Nice to see others doing the same... I started just around when the Alpha ended, got the lifetime pass with Alpha access, played the Beta and then binged the game for about 3 years straight after relase - well, as much as time allowed. Clocked in somewhere around 1600 hours in those three years, which isn't that much. Then I took a break because I didn't like getting pulled by Thargoids that would then let me get away just barely, was just too risky for me with the Cutter that I just got around that time. And I simply just needed to do something else. Then in 2019 I got into VR, always wanted to try out E-D with it, but somehow never managed to do so. Then the entire Odyssey fiasco kinda stopped me from actually doing it until I eventually just said to myself "Eff it, I'm gonna try it out now anyways!" and I'm glad I did.
I literally ignore the whole on-foot stuff still, because the weird theatre thing isn't that great actually (and E-D keeps recentering my VR on every switch, which is simply just annoying, besides the fact that I'd prefer a "please take off your headset or switch to Desktop Mode" message since my Virtual Desktop "desktop is much more nicely sized and more importantly than that, positioned (! - the thing in E-D hangs waaay too high, I'm not sitting in a cinema! Gets me a sore neck in the matter of a few minutes...)) and while the performance of 4.x is actually worse just like the Antialiasing is, it at least does run decently well enough on my system with the Quest 3, albeit with Synchronous Space Warp enabled - would prefer to be able to keep that off.
Still having a great time even without that content and I kinda was like "maybe I should support the devs a little" and I am willing to get some ARX while having an eye on the Corsair (since I'm sorta a Gutamaya addict, those things are just great! - and I guess that one will get available for ingame credits rather soon) and also looking forward for the Panther Clipper Mk. II (I wish it had little more cargo BTW, they simply should just enable all size 8 and 7 slots for the +50% racks, with that it'd get pretty close to the 1400t actual capacity the OG Panther Clipper in FE2 has).
So I went ahead and logged in to the store in my browser, seeing there's some discounts going ATM which made me quite happy to say the least, as they happen to be at the right time - only to then find out I can't pay with PayPal. Well, we don't necessarily have credit cards where I live - in Germany - and we also don't get debit cards, but EC cards are pretty much the standard here and having any kind of credit card typically is around 40€ a year. Now the thing is I always was kinda anxious about "what if someone gets my CC number and plunders my bank account with that?", so at some point, when they finally got availabe, I decided to get a prepaid CC. So I basically am able to pay with that - but the issue is, I typically don't leave money on it and it typically takes the bank around 2 working days to get the money I transfer to them for that card onto the darn thing, simply because banks still are in the 19th century somehow - I mean, how SAFE are 4-digit PINs for your cards even, especially when it's widely known there's around 20-or-so-ish like general codes that always work? Well, it is what it is.
Then I read it would be possible to get ARX via Steam, but I couldn't quickly find a guide on how to link my Steam account with Frontier - and I'd only want to do that for getting ARX, I still want to play it without it being ran through Steam (even though I use SteamVR).
So basically I'm now waiting for the bank to process my transfer and HOPING that the sale on the Frontier store isn't over by then - who even does know how long it's running except for them themselves? Couldn't find any information on when it ends or even when it started - not the kind of information politics that I like. More transparency here would have me much more chilled since I simply don't wanna miss the sale discounts simply because the bank takes ages to move some basically virtual numbers from one thing to another, within the same house literally.
And then, I still fear something else might happen, namely this:
However, not having any fallback method for payments is a problem. There should be an alternative to cards, even if it's Paypal. I had this myself with the initial purchase of the game. The store would not accept my card, with no useful information given, not even a "denied" message. Neither Frontier nor the bank were able or willing to give me any hints what the damn problem was. At the time, Paypal was the only other thing that worked. Strangely, this is no longer so for me but no sign of a reason was ever detectable. Sometimes stuff just doesn't work and ignoring that as a company depending on customers is doing damage.
I've had that issue before as well. As some might remember, you couldn't buy the Oculus Quest 2 in Germany for the first two years because back then Facebook had issues with German data / privacy policies, which ultimately lead them to rebranding themselves into Meta (at least that's the actual reason behind all of that, I guess. German law didn't allow them to require you to have an account of company B - Facebook - in order to use a device from company A - Oculus. So they came up with the Meta thing to get past those issues they would have been facing).
So I tried to do what everyone did - get that thing off of Amazon France. Guess what? Non-German Amazon sites don't allow payment via German bank account withdrawal and they never had PayPal, mainly because PayPal for a long time was a part of its competitor eBay. At some point they announced PayPal would become available as an option after the eBay / PayPal breakup, but that never happened. So I was down to having to use my credit card. Charged it with 500€, tried to order that thing - and it failed. I called up the bank and the CC company (MasterCard) and they told me the transaction was automatically blocked because it could have been a fraud. Then I explained them why I even got a prepaid card to protect myself from stuff like that and asking why most of my transactions get blocked anyway and they couldn't give me a valid answer very much to politicians getting asked anything by journalists - they just kept evading. Anyways, I asked them to unblock the thing (which previously was possible, and I only had used the card to buy from UK based sellers before) and they then came up with "Well, we can't do that anymore, you need to do that by yourself!", then I asked them how that would be possible and they explained me that I am required to have an ID-app on my phone in order to do that. I was like "Is there no other way? I totally do not want to do ANYTHING at all that has anything to do with BANKING on my phone - I could simply lose it ot it might get stolen and I see that as a major secutity concern the same way I see it with having an email client logged in on that thing that basically would allow any thief to access ALL of my accounts and hijack them" and they only replied "There's no other way, you either need to go down that route or you can't pay, I'm sorry - I can totally understand your sentiments and didn't decide that, I can just tell you how it is". Well, I then went through the process of getting that ID-App, wanted to try ordering the Q2 again, only to face Amazon telling me "You have reached the limit of how many of these you can buy." even though the transaction failed. Tried to write the support, wrote an article about my issue in English, German and had it Google translated into French even (which I put on top, but with a disclaimer giving away I used a translator), and I never got an answer... and I never came to another purchase to see how the whole thing with that ID app works, so I don't even know into which issues I might still run.
And that's where I am now sitting here, just wishing I could pay with PayPal, which always worked fine for me. Never had any issues with it. Actually, even the opposite is the case. I have to deal with some health issues, can't work anymore because of that and have to receive citizen's benefits to live off of. That typically causes me to not have a lot of money saved up, but I can plan having x amount of unit of money less for y months and while I can't get any 0% financing offers anywhere since the banks require me to have a job and they need some documents with my monthly income, I'm utterly glad I can basically do the same thing with PayPal. Typically I'd have to pay interest rates, but stores like Alternate often have 0% promotions and I pretty much bought my entire current hardware that way.
In the end, it's all about having options though. I hope the entire prepaid CC transaction will work without issues and I can still take benefit of the current discounts. I kinda suspect that Frontier might end them on Thursday when they'll do the usual server maintenance. Hooves crossed ^^
PS: I am going to keep my prepaid CC charged with like 50€ or so, so I won't run into this "having to wait until the bank does the actual charging" thing again.
